America's First Radio Tour

The year 1922 was the year of America's First Radio Tour. In June the Detroit Board of Commerce, the Detroit Automobile Club and the Lincoln Highway Association sponsored a traveling radio event. Two cars were supplied by the Rickenbacker Motor Company. The Tour left Detroit on June 1, 1922 and arrived in Los Angeles July 13th, 43 days later. More here. But this was no broadcasting bonanza, it was a listening tour. On July 10th in San Francisco Mrs Blood was quoted:

"Every night we would tune in, no matter where we were along the Lincoln Highway. One night, when we were nearing Omaha, we listened to Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, who are with the Follies in New York. We had a vaudeville star for an entertainer nearly every evening."

The two men in charge were Wallace Blood and O. William Heinz, both Detroit business men and radio aficionados. They were accompanied by their wives. They were showcasing new radio equipped cars following scheduled concerts along their route. William Blood was (probably) the ad man, a partner at Campbell, Blood & Trump. It was a promotional tour.. plain and simple. But in 1922 reception was not a given. In parts of Nebraska and Ely, NV they couldn't receive anything either due to conditions.

The lead car was outfitted with an exceptionally sensitive seven-tube radio receiver built by Tesla Labs. It came with two powerful antennas and a Magnavox "Magnaloud" speaker. The first antenna was a 200 foot loop on the roof, and the second (a back up antenna) was just a 200-foot aerial mounted on the running board. The second was also a supply car to carry stocked with replacement parts to keep the radio working. More here.

Contemporary articles claim they drove 2,800 miles. But even in 1922 that drive wouldn't take 43 days. That's only 65 miles per day. On the other side of Carson City is Lake Tahoe. I suspect they made a lengthy stop there. Route 80 didn't exist yet so it's probable that they took the Lincoln Highway as per their sponsors. But clearly they took breaks, stopped often and didn't exactly hurry. While in Nevada alone they stopped in Ely, Eureka, Austin, and Carson City.

Transcription Mystery Disc #246 (New Years Edition)

This is a 6.5-Inch, metal-core, Wilcox-Gay Recordio. It's the flip side of that Xmas disc I ripped last week. This side was recorded earlier and is labeled with the date 12-25-49. I ripped them out of sequence, purists will just have to get over it. The disc is also labeled "WHITE CHRIST" and the song isn't White Christmas.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town



As Christmas songs go it's an oldie. The tune was written by John F. Coots and Haven Gillespie in 1934. It's first broadcast was on Eddie Cantor's radio show in November 1934, making it a solid 80 years old now. This recording isn't as clear as the A-side, it had small chip destroying the first couple rotations, and the levels aren't quite as good. Notably the engineer also fumbles the mic early in the tune making that tell-take wiggling cable sound.

Cantor Cantori Cantoral

The image above is scanned and cropped from the cover of the Eddie Cantor Picture Book from 1933. It was a gift from the generous Aleta Medowlark, author of the blog Omnomicon.

Eddie Cantor was born on January 31, 1892, as Edward Iskowitz. Both of his parents died before he was three. So he was raised by his grandmother on the Lower East Side. He became a street performer, and sang and danced at a saloon on Coney Island. He won an amateur night contest and started performing vaudeville. He toured with various theater companies the most renowned of which was Ziegfeld’s Follies. More here. He was performing on the radio as early as 1922. The Connecticut Bridgeport Telegram reported his as follows:

"Local radio operators listened to one of the finest programs yet produced over the radiophone last night. The program of entertainment which included some of the stars of Broadway musical comedy and vaudeville was broadcast from the Newark, N. J. station WDY... G. E. Nothnagle, who conducts a radiophone station at his home 176 Waldemere Avenue said last night that he was delighted with the program, especially with the numbers sung by Eddie Cantor..."

In 1931 Cantor appeared with Rudy Vallee on The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour. That led to a four week stint on The Chase and Sanborn Hour on NBC. It went well enough that CBS gave him his own show "The Eddie Cantor Show" in 1931. Over the years it was sponsored by Pepeco toothpaste, Chase and Sanborn Coffee, Bristol Meyers, Texaco, and Camel Cigarettes. He lost his job because of that last sponsor. R.J. Reynolds, makers of Camel cigarettes, threw a fit when Cantor denounced Father Charles Coughlin as a Nazi and Fascist. The irony here is twofold. First Coughlin was in fact a supporter of the Nazis and fascism. Second, Couglin had already denounced Cantor for being Jewish. If you need an analogy, Couglin is very similar to Glenn Beck in modern terms.

In 1940 Jack Benny got him back on NBC where he started a new program Time to Smile. That program ran until 1946. In 1946 sponsor Pabst Blue Ribbon launched a show hosted by Cantor. That program ran three years ending in 1949. After that he was the host of The 64 Dollar Question but only for one season.

In 1949 he began hosting a weekly program for Philip Morris called 'Show Business Old and New'. Some sources put that as only the programs between 1952 and 1953 but others over the whole life of the program 1951 to 1954. He made the leap to TV after that. But the transition didn't seem to do his career any good. He was one of the hosts of the Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC. Most interestingly he hosted the first NTSC Color TV broadcast November 22nd 1953. He was also the recipient of some of the first TV censorship in 1944 on WPTZ-TV where they blurred the screen and cut the audio over some key lines in the song "We're Havin' A Baby, My Baby And Me." NBC's Continuity Acceptance Department had already cut dialogue from the script... then censored even what they had previously allowed. TV was a poor fit for Cantor. He retired from TV in 1955 after a heart attack.

In the 1960s he came back to radio to do a weekly 5-minute short called "Ask Eddie Cantor." It was sponsored by "Aluma-Glow" a product which strangely still exists. This in a strange way was Eddies best show. He answered listeners questions with jokes and sometimes in song. It tapped into that improvisational talent that he had honed in vaudeville. It was the same reason that he had been the first radio performer to insist on a live studio audience. He wanted that instant response. Btu the result had been laughter and applause making his show sound more lively on air. That program was cut short. He died in 1964 at the age of 72.

GOOD NIGHT, Mrs. Calabash

You have to love radio bios like this. Jimmy Durante started originally a saloon piano player. How great is that? Durante received his first radio job when the creators of Eddie Cantor's popular The Chase and Sanborn Hour contacted him to fill in for Cantor. He'd been a pretty successful vaudeville man and was considered a pretty safe pick. He turned out to be a little more than that. Durante was such a hit he was offered his own show. It was syndicated on NBC Saturday Nights for a little more than two years running 1954 - 1956. More here.

"Good night, Mrs. Calabash —wherever you are!" For years, Jimmy Durante ended his radio and television shows with that mysterious tag line. Some people thought Mrs. Calabash was a fictional character, but others were convinced she was real. Among those were the residents of Calabash, North Carolina believe otherwise. The folks in this town will tell you she was a real person, that Mrs. Calabash was really a local woman named Lucille "Lucy" Coleman. Here's the story... all apocryphal of course.

In 1940, Lucy was 28 years old and running a restaurant in Calabash, then a tiny seaside community bordering South Carolina. Durante and his touring vaudeville group supposedly stopped in for dinner. It may have been the genuine homespun friendliness of the young restaurant owner that prompted the gregarious Jimmy Durante to beckon Lucy over to his table for some short chitchat. "I'm going to make you famous," said Durante. It wasn't long afterward that this popular entertainer began signing off his radio shows with a similar message.

For years, audiences enjoyed this rather lighthearted farewell mystery. By the time of Durante's
Lucy Coleman died in 1989, nearly 50 years after meeting Jimmy Durante and nine years after Jimmy passed on. Calabash residents claim that Lucy had no desire to claim credit as the real Mrs. Calabash.
Their are other claimants of course... But I like that story best.